Pakistan faces new frontier against attacks: Balochistan’s Pashtun areas 

Islamabad, Pakistan — Violence has surged since June across Balochistan’s Pashtun-majority districts, areas which had largely escaped the fighting that has engulfed much of Pakistan’s southwestern province.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province by area, resource-rich but its least developed, bordering Afghanistan and Iran.

While Baloch nationalist rebels have waged an armed rebellion against the state there for two decades, the Pashtun-majority districts had, until recently, remained largely outside that conflict.

That pattern has now changed.

On September 1, security forces said they had repelled an attack, claimed by the Pakistan Taliban  (known by the acronym TTP), on a customs facility at a major intersection, Ziarat Cross, in the Pashtun-dominated Pishin district, 100km northeast of Balochistan’s capital Quetta. Several armed fighters and six security and customs personnel were killed.

Three days later, security forces said they had killed 26 more fighters from the group in a separate operation in Shaban, on the outskirts of Quetta, another Pashtun-populated area.

It was during the same period, on September 3, that gunmen ambushed a paramilitary convoy returning from Ziarat district, situated more than 100 kilometres (62 miles) east of Quetta. A police officer, speaking to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, said more than a dozen paramilitary personnel were killed.

The Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), the most prominent armed separatist group, claimed responsibility for the attack, but the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the Pakistani military’s media wing, has not officially acknowledged the attack.

Al Jazeera sent seven questions to Pakistan’s military media wing about the security situation in Balochistan, including a query about the September 3 ambush, but received no response.

Al Jazeera also sought comment from Babar Yousafzai, an official in the Balochistan home department, who did not respond.

Balochistan overtakes Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Data from multiple Pakistani monitoring organisations tracking violence shows that Balochistan has this year overtaken neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as the country’s most violent province.

The Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS), an Islamabad-based think tank, publishes monthly and weekly assessments of violence across the country.

According to its data, Balochistan has been Pakistan’s most affected province through most of 2026, with the gap over Khyber Pakhtunkhwa widening sharply from July. PICSS called July “the deadliest month of 2026” nationally and said the security situation had deteriorated most sharply in Balochistan.

Its weekly review for the first week of that month recorded 25 attacks and 102 deaths in Balochistan alone, pointing to “increasing TTP activity in northern districts” as a contributing factor.

The TTP, formed in 2007, is separate from the Afghan Taliban, though they fought together against United States-led forces in Afghanistan. The TTP has also hosted Afghan fighters in Pakistan.

In August, PICSS recorded security forces killing 115 fighters in Balochistan, compared with 56 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 32 in the merged tribal districts, giving the province the highest toll of the three regions.

The military’s own moves suggest it is treating the shift seriously.

Faisal Naseer, until recently the director-general for counterintelligence at Inter Services Intelligence — Pakistan’s main spy agency — was appointed national coordinator of the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) on September 4. The following day, Naseer was in Quetta when Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir visited Quetta Garrison, where he was given a detailed briefing on measures aimed at maintaining “peace and stability” across Balochistan.

“The field marshal reaffirmed that the peace, prosperity and well-being of the people of Balochistan remained central to the efforts of the state,” ISPR said.

On September 6, Naseer also met Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti and other political leaders to discuss the overall law and order situation and a coordinated strategy for establishing peace.

Bugti, speaking in the Balochistan Assembly over the weekend, said it was “deeply disturbing” that people and security personnel were “being killed on a daily basis”.

A belt largely spared

Until this June, one part of Balochistan had remained largely outside the violence.

Open-source tracking by the Durand Dispatch, a Pakistan-focused security monitor, shows that 11 Pashtun-majority districts – Zhob, Sherani, Qila Saifullah, Loralai, Musakhail, Duki, Barkhan, Pishin, Qila Abdullah, Ziarat and Harnai – recorded not a single attack by an armed group between January and May.

That changed the following month. On June 10, gunmen on motorbikes attacked police installations across four of these districts. Pashtun-majority districts have recorded at least 13 attacks by armed groups since then, including the killing of 27 police personnel guarding a dam project near Ziarat in July. The June attack was claimed by the BLA, while the TTP and Baloch groups claimed the different July attacks.

The July killings of police personnel, in particular, drew sharp public reaction. Families of the dead and Pashtun nationalist parties held a three-day sit-in in Quetta, accusing the government of leaving trapped officers without reinforcements.

Rafiullah Kakar, a Balochistan-focused policy analyst, told Al Jazeera the pattern “represents a relatively new and significant development”.

“The group’s [BLA’s] willingness and apparent ability to strike beyond its traditional areas of operation indicate an expanding geographical reach,” he said. “It also raises questions about whether there is some degree of tactical coordination or cooperation of the BLA with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan [TTP].”

Iftikhar Firdous, a security analyst and cofounder of The Khorasan Diary, an independent research and media portal that tracks regional conflicts, told Al Jazeera the TTP had been building outreach in Balochistan since 2019, “initially ideologically focused literature in the Balochi language”.

“The TTP chief, Noor Wali Mehsud, had expressed the desire publicly to create an alliance with the ‘Sarmachars’,” he said, using the Balochi language word for armed fighters.

He pointed to how the N-50 national highway connects Balochistan’s Pashtun-dominated districts of Zhob and Ziarat, via regional capital Quetta, with South Waziristan, the birthplace of the TTP, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

A trade corridor under strain

Then there is the corridor that carries much of Balochistan’s trade with Iran and domestically with Karachi. Businesses along it say they are being squeezed hard.

Haji Amin Sumalani, a chief executive member of the Balochistan Goods Trucks Owner Association, told Al Jazeera that the N-40, the major road connecting the border town of Taftan to Quetta, and the N-25, which connects Quetta to Karachi, the country’s largest city, had been “effectively unusable” for four months.

“Our drivers are in fear and not willing to travel on these highways due to the imminent threat of attack by armed militants who often set our goods transport trucks on fire,” he said.

More than 100 trucks had been set alight during that period, he said, causing losses of hundreds of millions of rupees, or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. Two drivers had also been killed.

Muhammad Ayoub Miryani, president of the Quetta Chamber of Commerce, told Al Jazeera that roughly 90 percent of the chamber’s business had stopped.

“Every trader is losing crores of rupees,” he said. A crore is 10 million rupees, worth about $36,000 at current exchange rates.

What comes next

Questions remain over why Balochistan’s Pashtun belt is clearly the latest front in Pakistan’s battle against armed groups, and what this means for the government’s response.

Imtiaz Baloch, a Quetta-based independent researcher tracking security with a focus on Balochistan, told Al Jazeera that armed groups were trying “to extend their operations beyond their traditional strongholds and target strategic transportation corridors that carry both military and economic importance”.

He said the routes through northern Balochistan had, unlike highways elsewhere in the province, “largely remained operational and have proven difficult for insurgent groups to gain any success similar to others”, which is precisely what makes the corridor an attractive target now.

Rahim Nasar, another Quetta-based security and political analyst, pointed to how the Pakistani military had carried out major military campaigns against the TTP in January and February in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Since those campaigns, “most of those fighters migrated here,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Their resurgence began after April, and by June, they had confirmed their strategic positions and significantly ramped up attacks,” Nasar added.

Still, he said he was unsure about active collusion between the TTP and the BLA, two ideologically divergent groups. Rather, he said, “whoever finds access to an area strikes there”.

Baloch, meanwhile, cautioned against reading the shift as the result of a single trigger.

“Insurgency in Balochistan should be understood as an evolving conflict shaped by cumulative grievances and strategic calculations rather than a single catalyst,” he said.

Kakar, too, argued that parts of the Pashtun belt were already experiencing political and economic discontent, including protests over border closures and restrictions affecting cross-border livelihoods.

An expansion of armed groups into these areas risks making that worse.

“This could deepen existing grievances against the state, particularly if communities perceive themselves as simultaneously bearing the economic costs of tighter security measures and the consequences of deteriorating security,” he said.